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San Bernardino terrorist sent Facebook messages pledging to fight the West: report

The Pakistani woman who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., with her husband supported jihad in 2012.

The Islamic extremist husband and wife who killed 14 people in a rampage in San Bernardino apparently sent messages over Facebook urging jihad three years ago.

Tashfeen Malik, the terrorist believed to be behind the San Bernardino shootings, apparently sent two private Facebook messages to friends in Pakiston months before arriving in the U.S. pledging support for Islamic jihad and saying she hoped to one day fight the West, according to a Los Angeles Times report.

Malik is believed to have sent the messages in 2012 and 2014 pledging to support Islamic jihad, warnings that U.S. intelligence agencies missed before she entered the United States on a K-1 fiancee visa in July 2014.

FBI agents investigating Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, discovered the Facebook messages. They believe it was sent to a small circle of friends in Pakistan, and was written in the nation’s official language of Urdu.

Malik indicated in the messages that she wished to become a jihadist herself.

Fourteen people died and 22 wounded when Malik and her husband went on a rampage in San Bernardino, and then led police in a chase and died in a violent shootout.

Authorities believe the couple self-radicalized and were not official part of the Islamic State (ISIS) or any other terrorist group. They believe they were both self-radicalized before they met on the Internet in 2013, and could have been radicalized long before that. On the day of the shooting, they declared their allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook.

Police have not yet filed any charges against Enrique Marquez, a neighbor and friend of the couple who sold them two semiautomatic rifles used in the attack. The report cited an official who said that pressing charges against him would cut off any chanec of him leading investigators to other people he had been in contact with as part of the attaack.